These days I am not much on listening to the radio. We now have iPods and things to listen to just music. I’m the type of person who has never really cared too much for radio talk shows. If by chance I am listening to the radio I always change the station when the morning talk show is on or a commercial comes on. I just like music better. However, I do love listening to stories.

I came across this love of just listening to stories when I had to make a 7 hour drive to South Carolina to meet up with my family for Thanksgiving. I had stayed behind because my boyfriend at the time was in the hospital and I wanted to stay with him as long as possible. So I ended up waking up at 3 AM and driving 7 hours by myself. As I crossed through the states the radio stations became funky and I came across a station (unfortunately I don’t remember the name) that was just a talk show. It had no music and no commercials, just talk. I listened to it for about 4 hours straight. It was awesome!

Listening to actual radio hosts talk about the dynamics of radio, I started to think back to the one time I actually listened to a radio show and I can start to kind of recognize some of those details. When Ira Glass started discussing the anecdote for the stories in the first part, I started think “Wow, that is actually how those stories went”. I would never had noticed the flow of the story, then the moment of reflection without him saying it, but it really was there. The stories did have a boring factor to them, but they were intriguing keeping me listening for a whole 4 hours!

I also agree with Ira Glass when he was discussing that finding great stories takes a lot of time. I can somewhat relate to this in my Biology lab when we have to come up with our own experiment. You normally think the long daunting part will be the actual experiment, but in reality the majority of the time is coming up with the perfect experiment that will explain your hypothesis. It takes so long it becomes frustrating! You have to be ruthless about the things you want so bad to work, but in your head you know that Biology will not let it happen. This was my thinking when he started explaining how to find stories. I greatly sympathize with him and this process.

In the third part of this adventure, Ira Glass seemed very arrogant. I disliked the way he sounded and perceived himself. I realize that he is very successful and very good at his job, but he kept going on about it. That was all I could focus on with this part. However, the little bit I did get out of this part was that you should keep going even though you are in a rough spot and does a mass amount of work to try and get out of a dry rut. I have always been a believer in this method, but his arrogance drew away from this fact.

I thought the next part to be quite humorous. When he showed his older video, I couldn’t stop laughing! He really did exaggerate every 3rd word. It does seem like people on TV shows and radio shows do talk with emphasis on specific things. I feel I would do the same thing. For some reason, people perceive this as sounding like a professional in that business.

The video by Jad Abumrad was very inspiring. I loved the way he worded how he thinks radio is perceived by his audience. He said that he is painting a picture, but that the listeners have the brush and are able to create our own picture. He called it “co-imagining”. If he spoke that beautifully about what he does, I can only imagine how he actually speaks when he is actually talking on the radio.

Keep Jammin’